Chapter 754: Pheonix and Dragon in the Frozen Flow of Time
The SUV hit the road for the third time, but this time... on its driver’s side with a sound like the sky itself splitting open, metal screaming in a long, wet, tearing howl as the vehicle slammed sideways into the asphalt and began its obscene, rolling death-dance.
It rolled again with Phei’s sight as he never stopped watching, his eyes forced open to watch, roof kissing the ground in a violent crunch that sent glass exploding outward like frozen stars, then rolled once more, the entire cabin twisting in a slow, merciless carousel of destruction while the late-afternoon sunlight poured through the shattered windows in mocking golden shafts that illuminated every detail of the horror unfolding inside.
His mother’s hand had already slipped from his small cheek on the third rotation but the warm fingers that had reached across the impossible distance now torn away by the centrifugal force of the rolling wreck, sliding across his skin with one last lingering caress before gravity and momentum claimed it forever, leaving his face cold and empty where her love had been.
He could still feel that warmth!
On the side, Aunt Melissa, suspended beside him in her seatbelt like a broken doll, had her dark hair flung across her face in a tangled curtain and her cream sundress soaked crimson along the right shoulder where some jagged piece of the cabin had punched through her flesh.
The small phoenix pendant at her throat had snapped free of its chain during the violent spin and now floated, weightless and mocking, in the brief zero-gravity intervals between rolls — a tiny golden bird drifting lazily through the blood-misted air between them, its wings catching the dying sunlight as if it alone refused to acknowledge the end.
It was like an undying, immortal phoenix.
Melissa’s hand was reaching across the cabin toward him, fingers outstretched in the same desperate maternal arc his mother had tried, the same futile love trying to bridge the gap between adult and child while the world folded itself into ruin around them.
Then —
Time froze making Phei’s eyes grow wide... the tears from his eyes that had been rolling with the car were paused with everything else too, so was the necklace.
The SUV halted mid-roll, suspended in a cruel, perfect stillness that no mortal physics could explain, shattered glass hung motionless in the air like a thousand glittering accusations threatening to rain on everyone like spears of a furious deity should time dare resume.
His mother’s blood halted mid-spray, suspended in delicate red arcs that painted the cabin in frozen calligraphy, Aunt Melissa’s reaching hand stopped inches from his face, fingers curled in eternal longing. His small mouth froze mid-scream
The sunlight itself in its all-reaching omnipotence froze in its slanted beams through the broken windows, turning the entire cabin into a grotesque diorama of love and loss and inevitable doom.
Time froze but not for him.
Fate had decided, perhaps, to pause and savor the view, together with him.
Or fate had decided to laugh in his face with the cold, patient cruelty only the universe could muster.
Or fate had decided to give him one last perfect, damning, merciless view of everything he could not save — every detail etched in crystal clarity so that the seventeen-year-old mind trapped inside the seven-year-old body would carry the image for the rest of his broken life.
But suddenly the quiet frozen flow of time was broken through by as beautiful, desperate cry of a bird pierced the frozen air.
No... it was not a bird.
He had never heard the sound before with his small ears, yet his seventeen-year-old mind, buried somewhere far outside the small body and inside another body altogether, recognized it in fragments of deep, instinctual memory that did not belong even to his conscious old self.
The cry arrived like a blade of pure cosmic longing, long and beautiful and desperate, piercing the frozen cabin and travelling straight into his small ears and his vast unmade chest with the patient, insistent force of a creature that had been trying to reach him for ten long years and had only now, in the breaking of his body under Eira, found a crack wide enough to crack through and call him.
And then—
Then world itself shock in fear and hastily retreated as roar broke through reality.
The roar did not belong to this world.
The sounded older than continents, older than oceans, older than the present sun itself.
It tore through heaven and earth and the fragile fabric of reality, driving away the frozen accident, the suspended blood, the reaching hand of his aunt, and at the center of that roar, rising from the deepest parts of his own soul, came a voice he recognized yet he had never heard before:
"Find her."
The sound of the words were cosmic... Ancient... Absolute.
"You’re the key."
It echoed through every cell of his small body like the birth-cry of a dying Star Ruler.
"Stop her."
The words carried the weight of ten years of unanswered screams.
"Only you can."
Then the voice softened, almost tender, a small private register that cut deeper than any blade.
"Find your little sister, Phei."
The four main words hit his soul like a second, far more devastating crash.
Then...
...He was no longer in the cabin...
...Phei was no longer seven years old.
He was ripped backward through the frozen accident and through the rolling wreckage and through the truck and through the road and through the ten-year gulf of the river of time between his soul and the moment, and his seventeen-year-old body convulsed in its four crystalline chains in the cathedral hollow with the violence of a soul being slammed back into a body it had briefly stepped out of.
His back arched against the chains until the barbed spikes tore fresh rivers of blood down his wrists and ankles and throat.
Phei’s throat ripped open in a sound that was not language but pure, raw cosmic defiance.
The cathedral hollow’s afternoon light returned to his bleeding eyes in a sudden, hot flood, and the ten Titans walking their slow patient circle around him paused in their stride at the same dilated heartbeat —
— because in his soul, in the place Eira had cut his connection to the Dragon’s Regeneration two hours and forty-four minutes ago, in the place the Void-Ice element had been seated in dormant patient inheritance since the day his awakening cracked open—
—something answered.
It was like a door he had been pushing against for two hours and forty-four minutes finally opening — not at his command, not at Eira’s command, not at the regimen’s command, but at the command of the Phoenix’s cry and the Cosmic Dragon’s roar and the four words still ringing through every cell of his vessel.
Find your little sister.
